Read up on RCS’ history, and current standard.
RCS is a clown college of brokenness that doesn’t include encryption, and not even all of the telcoms in the country put together could make an official client for it. It is no more a standard than iMessage, and it certainly isn’t as good of one.
Drats. I give it a go every handful of years because I want it to be great, but that’s my experience every time, too.
I still hold out hopes, since Blender used to be the same way. When I last tried Blender, their keyboard shortcuts and scene navigation were clearly developed by someone who thinks that using emacs is a good idea, and that vi never should have been improved.
But they’re a serious pro tool now that has a foothold in the 3D industry which I would not have predicted back then.
This is a fantastic list! Thank you for sending it my way. Saved for later exploration and I commented with my latest free (though only partially open source) app suggestion.
Fantastic list!
If you’re ok with including AI art generating apps on the list then check out Draw Things.
It’s free, runs the models only locally on your device, and collects no data/has an excellent clear privacy policy. It also does it in a fairly user-friendly way.
I have been extremely blown away by how capable it is. You can import Checkpoints, LoRa, Embeddings, and other Stable Diffusion-based things downloaded from huggingface, and civitai, likely other places. You can mix models and train LoRa. It has recently added API and http server functionality so you can automate image generation or plug it into other apps. It even can generate up to 25-frames of video, and it includes an exporter that does video frame interpolation.
It runs on iPhone, iPad, Mac, and the iPad version runs on VisionOS. I take a photo with my phone and make crazy variations of art with it without having internet access or paying a dime more than my expensive device already cost me.
With a separate app I can turn things I generate into stereo photos or video and see them in 3D on my headset.
I can also zoom in and enhance parts of photos, or upscale them in ways that hallucinate reasonable details.
I feel like I’m one hoverboard away from the future I was promised as a kid!
I’ve been so enamored with this app recently that it’s making me consider a career change, so I apologize if I’m coming off like an advertisement.
I’ll have to check it out. Thank you for the recommendation!
In many specific applications current AI algorithms already exceed human capabilities. That’s been the case for much longer than the LLM craze. And as new AI algorithms are developed it becomes more and more likely that even without Artificial General Intelligence, the category of computing known as AI could reach a point that it exceeds human capabilities in all possible applications.
But even with that fact it’s true that we shouldn’t treat the current implementations of AI as if it were human.
If we ever develop an actual AGI and it is ad capable as a human, then we should reconsider, but nothing we have now seems to imply we are close to that.
Has GIMP improved much in the last five years?
My partner uses Adobe products for one of his jobs, and he had installed their cloud software on one of my laptops on his user account. Which forced it on all other user accounts, too.
I found that it installed horribly challenging to kill or remove daemons that would relaunch and reinstall their spyware bullshit if you didn’t kill all of them in the right way, and it was spamming me a pop-up asking for my password to install other things, which I couldn’t prevent.
I was able to stop it after many attempts and then got my partner to uninstall that junk from my laptop.
That was all still more user-friendly than the last time I tried to use GIMP.
Are there viable alternatives for their products?
If I haven’t seen the first 9, will I understand the plot of ROG Ally X?
This reference is so old, that Johnny 5 must be dead by now.
Keep pants on! Got it!
Today I learned I’m a fabulous dish!
Why bother with that? If you need shoes to dissolve, regardless of the materials, just subject them to my foot sweat for a few months.
I think it was a one or two day thing, but it was glorious!
Which is why the robot voice actors should unionize. It’s a crime that human voice actors have been stealing their jobs for so long!
It still failed to hit projected box office returns with that factored in!
It’s just funny because it’s a good movie and the first one won an academy award but is terrible.
And they won it for writing “damaged” on Joker’s forehead… at least in part.
Except Apple did better than analysts forecasted, and announced a buyback, causing the stock price to go up.
He lost money compared to if he had waited until after.
Fun fact, The Suicide Squad (2021) was a box office flop, whereas Suicide Squad (2016), the only academy award winning DCEU film, was a box office smash hit!
A mild copyright violation based on a system designed around the constant distribution of copies of things is NOT a parable about sexual violence, people.
I feel like this extremely insensitive rape take is the fediverse’s version of the Godwin Law.